How we got here and why Gift Off is launching a token sale

I’m Rusty, the Founder and CEO at Gift Off (eGift Card retailer in the UK). With a team of 3, almost no marketing and a website with minimal features, Gift Off has had revenues of around £13 million in the last year and expect this to reach £27 million this year. I’m really excited to think of what we can achieve with a chunk of funding.

We’re therefore trying an innovative approach to fundraising by launching a token sale on Friday 9th March at 08:00 GMT. For all the details, check out our tokens page, or contact me directly if you want to chat:

https://tokens.giftoff.com/
rusty@giftoff.com

The first token representing equity in an underlying company

It’s the first time a token is being created that represents equity in an underlying company and we’re well aware of the newness of such an approach to fundraising, and the consequent uncertainty or mistrust that some people feel. As such, I thought it might be helpful to tell the story of how Gift Off came to be and give some background about the people involved.

I’m also planning to write some more posts in the coming days, looking more in depth at the gift card market, the opportunity Gift Off has been presented with and some discussion around how our token sale is being set up and run. In the meantime, check out the Medium post from Cavenham Capital (run by our Investor Director, Adam, who knows all about the crypto world!), looking at why we’re going down the token sale route: https://medium.com/@cavenham/gift-off-tokens-a-new-equity-token-6215992ccd02

Here we go, or once upon a time…

It was back in 2013 when bitcoin first properly came to my attention. I had been working as a developer at Satalia (involved with big data, algorithms and AI) and self employed as a web dev/SEO, so was amongst a fair few people who were following what was happening with bitcoin and blockchain technology. A few years before that, I’d been studying for a PhD at UCL in the field of medical biology. The PhD had come at a bad time and I ended up getting a bit burnt out and needing a break. Whilst taking a break, I decided I needed to go in a different direction, having always had a desire to have my own business.

Will code for rent

I also needed some money to pay my rent in London, so turned to coding, which had been a hobby I’d had since I was a kid when my mum got me a computer in the late 80s. Through chatting to people I knew and came across, I started getting bits of work doing web development for small businesses and individuals. It was enough to get by and seemed to gather some momentum, eventually doing full-time work for a company, where, not only did I sort out the website, I got them really solid results from SEO.

From chicken supplies to gift cards

One job lead to another and I ended up working for an agency in London called The Digital House as an SEO. I was always working on side projects at the same time, and have, in the past run or co-run a bunch of small eCommerce businesses ranging from chicken supplies to vintage clothes (which was my fiancee’s business).

The powers of business and coding combine

Fast-forward again to 2013 when my ears pricked up about bitcoin, you can see how my background in coding and starting small businesses combined and I hit on the idea of a small project to help the bitcoin community, making it possible to spend bitcoin on everyday items from Amazon. I sat at my parents’ house that Christmas creating a rudimentary, and pretty manual, service that would allow bitcoin users to do just that.

One man and his office chair

The intention with it was entirely simple, to help the bitcoin community. It did weirdly well in its first week. The success made it enjoyable and rewarding and it felt like I was doing something that people appreciated. On the back of that sense of fun, I was motivated to improve the service and make it a little more automated and slick. Bear in mind, it was just me, sat at home, doing some coding, handling all the orders, questions, etc. I was juggling this with my freelance work and almost full-time work at Satalia. So, any of our early customers reading this, thanks for your support!

My fiancee, Lois, who works full-time for Gift Off now, has been endlessly patient with me regularly working 100+ hours per week, and has picked up the slack at home while I’ve been welded to my office chair in my home office! We’re really lucky that we work well together and share the same vision. It’s an amazing plus for a startup, to have access to someone beyond the Founder who is willing to work for free, to get things off the ground.

Why is it going so well!?

Around the start of 2014, I realised that this basic service I’d set up, had legs. I got it all set up properly, set up our Twitter and Facebook profiles and started telling people there and on Reddit what we were doing.

I won’t go into too much detail of each feature we added to the site and how we built our range of gift cards, or we’ll be here all day. I think it’s enough to say I was shocked by the growth in the business between then and now. It’s still a surprise, even though now I have a much deeper understanding of the market we’re operating in.

We have carried out some prior fundraising that has got us to this point. This is where Adam came in. He’s got such a wealth of experience through his involvement in the bitcoin and crypto world. Right away, he totally understood what we were doing and appreciated our initial intentions with the business even before we had really solidified a plan for scaling in the gift card world. He’s the reason we’re able to even consider doing a token sale!

VCs not biting

Last year we spent a lot of time looking to raise VC funds. We did have interest and some deals got close, but ultimately it was very difficult. We feel those difficulties are in part because of our realistic, moderate approach. For most VCs we simply weren’t in the right sector, or asking for enough money.

There are other reasons we have had issues with traditional routes for fundraising, which you can read about in the Medium blog post I linked to in the intro.

OK, let’s scale this

Lois cottoned on to the opportunity pretty early on and came in to set down a clear vision and strategy for making the most of it, which helped clarify where I was heading. She’s now in a position, if we can get funding, to take on the day-to-day management of the business and scale it. This would involve building a more substantial team. We’d also be able to develop a fully fledged app that’s able to serve the mass market, rather than remaining only with our early adopters, for whom the current site serves pretty well. Finally, we’d be able to get in some marketing expertise to actually market the business beyond social media!

Hopefully this gives you a flavour of how we got to our current position and decided to go down the token sale route. I hope it also tells you a bit about the kinds of people we are and our motivations.

Again, if you want to chat, or have any questions, feel free to drop me a line: rusty@giftoff.com.